


Landslide

by AshVee



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Gen, Turn head and squint for pairing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-02
Updated: 2016-08-02
Packaged: 2018-07-28 20:12:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7655050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AshVee/pseuds/AshVee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarke has killed, and she has lied. She has grown and saved lives and climbed mountains. It is far past time that she recognize the woman in her reflection, in the reality of strength and in who she is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Landslide

Clarke stared up at Mt. Weather, at the glittering of the stars over its peak. They danced in the sky, flashing and shimmering behind a dull layer of cloud cover, shining down on Clarke even as she hid beneath the branches of a tree, staring up at the silence that was a dead mountain. A burial ground.

The burial ground she'd made.

A shiver raced up her spine and she tugged her leather coat tighter around her. It was a grounder coat, one that Lexa had gifted to her. The Commander had said that it would make her look stronger, that it would give her status and station. As Clarke felt gooseflesh rise against her arms in the chill of the night, she wished not for the first time that she had her old jacket, cotton and cloth and so very much more warm. There was a line between station and function, a line she'd crossed a long time ago.

She'd spent the last two weeks in the shadow of the mountain, watching it through sleepless nights and hunting and gathering at it's base by day. It was easier to provide for herself when it was just herself she needed to worry about. Without clumsy children twisting ankles and risk taking hunters coming in gored by their prey, her days were spent mostly just feeding herself, assuring her own safety and storing away a little day by day for the winter that would be coming sooner than later.

A wind rolled against her face, pushing her hair back and letting her stare up at the stars without obstruction. Without purpose, she drifted. Without responsibility...

Jasper and Monty would be having a hard time of it, she knew. Monty had helped her, and Clarke silently wished that Jasper would place any rage her felt square on Clarke and not the young man she'd recruited into hacking the Mt. Weather systems. She couldn't imagine a world where the pair of them were enemies instead of friends.

She couldn't imagine a world where she wasn't there to watch over them either. Another shutter took her, but this she knew wasn't from the cold.

The mountain was a dead thing, as dead as those buried beneath it. There was no radio signal any longer, no acid fog that would bellow from smoke stacks. Nothing to make anyone think that something might live upon it, and yet...Clarke would live upon it. There were animals that yet lived upon it. Grounders would give the mountain wide berth for generations to come, but Clarke...she stared up at the serenity that came with near abandonment.

She wanted to flee it's shadow and never return. Just like she'd left Camp Jaha. Just like she'd left so many things in the past, so many people. She'd left her father on the Arc, left his idealism and his smile. She carried his watch, but it was his watch and not his pride. She'd left him there because it was easier.

Just like it was easier to leave her mother. Her mother who was trying, if not succeeding. A woman that had done what she'd had to in order to protect her daughter and herself from the idealism of her husband, from the hope in his eyes and the shine off his heart, from things that never should have caused harm. And yet, they would have. It was easier to leave her behind, to throw her mother from her heart.

She'd throw a lot of people from her heart over the last year. She'd done a lot over the last year.

Her stomach roiled, the noise of hunger permeating the quiet night air loud enough that she rolled to her feet and stalked further into the forest, to where she'd set up her little camp at the bend of a river in a birch stand. The moon was high enough over head that it made the ever flowing water shine like silver, and Clarke couldn't help but bend low over it, crouching to drink and stare at her reflection, distorted in the waves and ripples.

It startled her for a moment, the girl in the water. She was thinner than Clarke ever remembered being, with an angled face that came from frowning more than from malnutrition, from a deep depression that she'd seen on others through the years. Her father used to say that you could read Clarke's thoughts in her eyes, her emotions, fears and hopes. Even with the running water for a mirror, she could see none of those in her reflection.

She thrust her hand into the water, sending the image away and stood. Her belly ached, but she ignored it, like she'd ignored so many things. Now, alone and with nothing to do in the night but think back on her sins, she could see them so clearly, see where she'd gone so wrong. It wasn't so much the sins but the missed possibilities that haunted her. Because she wasn't blind enough not to recognize the ache in her chest when she looked at Bellamy to be anything but what it was. She wasn't so blind now not to see how much her mother longed to reconcile.

But she needed to grow. She needed to be stronger, and at the time, Lexa had seemed right. Emotion was weakness, love was to be driven from the heart to make room for strength. There, standing alone, without anyone to love her, without anything to love, she'd never felt more weak. The moon shined off the water, and she glance down at it, down into the eyes of a woman that she didn't recognize, didn't want to be. The weight of it sent her to her knees, and in the darkness, beneath the shadow of her biggest sins, she sobbed.

She wasn't sure how long she cried, just that, as the sun started to rise up over the tops of her birch trees, she felt better than she had in months. In the light of day, she was stronger, she was something that could be who she'd been, only grown. She glanced down into the river, into the red-rimmed eyes that were far more familiar, and she smiled.

There had been things in her life that she'd done, terrible, near-unforgivable things that she would cringe about until the day she died. But they were necessary. They had changed her, but they would not define her. She couldn't see the knife that had ended Finn's life on her face or hear the ultimatum she'd given under the mountain in her voice. Her hands had done things, necessary things. Her voice had said strong words warning of stronger action.

Yet, her hands had nursed Jasper, had helped to free her people. Her voice had lulled the sick and had called out strong to give hope.

Before, on the Arc, as she sat happy and pure in her cell, she had done none of those things. She had not killed or lied. She had not deceived or abandoned. But, back on the Arc, in her cell, she'd drawn life. She'd not experienced it. She'd not swam in rivers or known the feel of the wind. She'd not sat with someone else and known that their misery was her misery, that their life was entwined with her life.

She'd been a child. Now she was an adult. Now she'd lived.

The realization startled her into laughter, and she sat in the early morning hours, staring up at the lightening sky and laughing until she cried again. She'd spent so long wondering at what everyone thought, what they saw in her actions and her words that she missed the truth of it all.

She missed the love that was given back to her, the acceptance. But getting that back meant returning, it meant taking all the looks and the weight of guilt. Sitting in the sunlight, she thought she could carry it. She might not have been able to at first, when they'd been sent to the ground, or even when the Arc Station had fallen, but sometime between then and now, she'd grown.

She'd grown, but there was still the good in her heart, still the great things that had been in her father's heart.

She'd had compassion even as she'd been forced to pull that lever. She'd been hopeful even up until Lexa had abandoned them. She'd seen everyone home, smiled down at them safe and whole and loved them despite their new scars.

Clarke had been a child, but growing up didn't make her less.

It made her more. She'd hidden from Abby and Bellamy and Finn. She'd taken what Lexa had taught and hidden it away in her chest like a festering thing, not to be seen for fear of what others might say, but in the light of a new day, with new tears on her cheeks and a light in her she hadn't felt in months, she could see the good even in those things. With the sun on them, realized for what they were, there was goodness there.

She spent the day watching Mt. Weather. The birds that dove from thermals into the tree tops. The doe and her fawn, growing up and taking bounding leaps away from it's mother. The wind in the leaves and the world coming to survive without the Mountain Men.

As the sun set that night, she lay down beside the river, stared up at the stars for several long minutes, and slept. The morning would be a big day after all. Tomorrow was the first step back down the hill that she'd climbed to get where she'd been. Back away from the Clarke of Mount Weather that had let Lexa and Wallace make her feel small, not strong enough on her own. Toward the Clarke that had survived, had helped her peers survive.

Toward those that had made her that person.

It took her three days to first see the perimeter of Camp Jaha in the hazy morning sunlight. Frost clung to the blades of grass she walked through, wetting her leather jacket and her pants and boots. The sun was warm on her skin as she crossed the waist high grass and waited.

She didn't have to wait long as the gates opened and two guards stepped out, armed with rifles and regarding her with unease. She didn't recognize either of them, but she did the woman that came from behind them at a stumbling run, reaching out as if her hands could grab Clarke from thirty feet away. They nearly did as Abby barreled into her, pulling her into her chest and beneath her chin and rocking her like Clarke was still a child. Somehow, they'd sunk into the grass and Abby's tears were wetting Clarke's hair, but she ignored it, letting herself relish in her mother's love for the first time since before she knew the truth of Jake Griffin.

"Clarke," Abby whispered, voice thick and breaking. Clarke didn't know if it was the first time the woman had said it or if it was just the first time Clarke had heard it, but she pushed away from her mother. She pressed her palms to either side of Abby's face and smiled.

The returning smile was watery, far closer to a grimace than happiness, but it didn't matter, not as they stood up and Abby turned her beneath her arm, as if Clarke was still small enough to fit there.

As the walked through the gates, no one looked to her, few were even awake, and as Abby led her over to a fallen tree that had been drug into the camp to serve as a bench, Clarke found that she didn't care. There would be some that did not want her there. There would be others, like her mother, that would take her any way that they could get her, as a child or as an adult, innocent or with stains on her heart.

She could love them without them loving her because that was strength. It wasn't what Lexa said. Strength wasn't pushing aside all feeling. Strength was letting yourself feel, letting yourself love the people around you, even when they didn't love you back. Abby left her there, in her leather jacket and damp pants, to get a first aid kit and a meal, and Clarke stared out at the Camp, at everything that had evolved while she'd been gone.

Nothing in particular caught her eye, nothing held her attention for longer than a moment. Her eyes flickered from thing to thing, from face she didn't know to face she might have once. Abby had only been gone a few short minutes when it happened.

Someone stepped over the trunk from behind her, close enough to brush her elbow with their shin. She hardly had time to glance up before a bowl was placed in her hands and the person settled, warm and familiar, beside her, close enough that their thighs brushed and elbows caught. Bellamy didn't say anything as he scooped a bite of what looked like oatmeal from his bowl. He kept his head down, attention meant to be on his breakfast, but his dark eyes kept flickering over, as if he was waiting.

"Thank you," she said after he'd taken another bite.

"Don't thank me yet," he said, and she was pleased to hear the familiar gruff affection in his voice. "It doesn't taste like anything special."

"Not for the food," she amended. He turned to look at her properly for the first time in months, and a slow look of realization crossed his face.

"You'll always be forgiven, Clarke," he said softly, reaching a hand up and pushing a piece of hair from her shoulder. "Even if I have to remind you from time to time."

"I'll count on you for that," she said, settling the bowl aside and leaning forward to press her forehead against his shoulder. They sat like that in the morning sunlight for far longer than any breakfast should last, and as Clarke looked out the corner of her eye, she could make out her mother, standing a few yards away, talking quietly to Kane and watching over them as if she'd been there a while. Abby caught her watching and nodded. It was a look Clarke recognized from when she was a child, a silent affirmative, a nod to encourage.

"I missed you," she said finally, turning her head again to press more firmly into his shoulder.

Bellamy sighed before setting his own bowl aside and shifting to pull her into his chest and beneath his arm.

"Don't leave again, Princess," he said, tucking his head down and pressing his face into her hair. He might have kissed the top of her head, but she didn't know. She just sat there, warm for the first time in months.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know your thoughts. This is a piece I'm pulling over from my FF.net account.


End file.
